Topical items and views on the impact of digitisation on publishing and its content and the issues that make the news. This blog follows the report 'Brave New World',
(http://www.ewidgetsonline.com/vcil/bravenewworld.html ), published by the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland and authored by Martyn Daniels. The views and comments expressed are those of the author.

Monday, August 16, 2010

The Times Readership Drops With Paywall

Rupert Muroch made a big statement and said that The Times, had to move to a paid-content online subscription system and made the transition. We now read the figure for July from ComScore which shows a 1.2 million user drop for May’s 2.79 million-strong readership, to 1.61 million. More disturbing is the drop in the visitors' average time on the site from 7.6 minutes in May to 4 minutes in July.

News Corp head Rupert Murdoch is quoted "With our paywall around the Times, we have had an encouraging number of people subscribing at a good price,"

However, trends in July impacted the free Telegraph and Guardian who both recording losses of online readership whilst The Mail Online and The Independent, strengthened to 9 million and 3.54 million unique visitors, respectively.

So who is right and who is wrong and who cares? The one thing that is certain is the Murdoch will not admit he was wrong easily . It’s said that obne swallow doesn’t make a summer and it will take more then one readership drop to herald Winter.

1 comment:

Matthew
said...

This looks like a win for Murdoch to me. 2.79 million readers paying nothing are certainly worth less than 1.6 million readers paying a nominal amount. Although on the face of it advertisers might be less happy with the drop in numbers, in reality they will be advertising to a much more select community, with money to spend, and who are no doubt more segmentable as they will have registered with the website to pay.

About Me

Before entering publishing I worked for many years as a Senior Executive in blue chip organisations in the retail, oil and automotive sectors. My publishing induction was initially as Director of Strategic Development at VISTA. There I was responsible for, and a contributor to, their highly acclaimed ‘Publishing in the 21st Century’ research series, the primary creator behind publishing services PubEasy and ‘batch.co.uk’, the initiator of the development of new Front Office systems to support publishers. In 2006 I joined Value Chain International(VCIL) initially as VP Marketing, Media and Publishing before becoming their President in 2009. In July 2011 the company's operations were acquired by Syncordia. I hold two non executive positions with publishing industry players Bibliophile Ltd and Haven Group and currently setting up Read Petite a service focused on providing digital short form material online via subscription.
Email mdaniels@opus57.co.uk